There is no such thing as an objective sample of goods and services for which you can monitor the changes in prices and establish "the" rate of inflation. When, for example, the prices of luxuries go down in real terms (and they certainly do when improving performance is also taken into account), but the prices of basics, such as food, housing, public transport, heating and clothing go up, poor people experience a much higher rate of inflation than the well off. You can only measure inflation if you decide first which socioeconomic group's inflation you want to measure. This is always a political decision, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. The precise selection of goods and services, ie the consumption pattern, which is currently used, necessarily defines a particular socioeconomic sector. The methodology should be published in full detail to identify the (inescapable) political bias in whose inflation is actually being measured and to be able to debate whose inflation ought to be measured.

Tom Voute

London

• What a pity you cast doubt on the integrity of the Government Statistical Service in your article on inflation. As is quite clear from the release published each month, the Office for National Statistics publishes three indices – the retail prices index, with and without mortgage interest, and the consumer price index, which excludes housing costs. This latter measure is the one that allows comparisons within Europe and a version including housing costs is being developed. Which indices are used by the Bank of England as inflation targets and by government to uprate benefits and pensions etc is entirely a matter for the government of the day. The release for last month shows clearly the time trends of all three indices and the current significantly higher level of the RPI measures. I do not think it is government statisticians who are misleading the public about the current level of inflation.

• Yesterday you reported that the CPI was being called into question as a true measure of inflation. The ONS took the usual bureaucrat's line and flannelled about following some obscure International Labour Organisation manual. If CPI is so squeaky clean, why have first the Royal Statistical Society and now the IAOS questioned its veracity? Despite the esoteric nature of the subject, it is important because over 20 years pensioners could lose 20% of their pensions. Younger people could see their pensions halved by the time they get them. Today the government is rushing through an order to move public service and state pensions to CPI. Many private-sector pensions will follow. MPs should vote against until the honesty of CPI as an inflation measure is put beyond doubt.

David Quinn

London

• From the point of view of Mervyn King, who has been taken unawares by the scale of the increases in global food and energy prices, things may be looking grim and grimmer; but they look grimmest for the 1.5 million, and rising, adults receiving unemployment benefit of £65.45 a week (Editorial, 16 February). The Centre for Research in Social Policy has shown that for the past four years the cost of a healthy diet, at £45 a week for a single adult, has risen faster than the retail prices index. The government has chosen this moment to use the slower rising consumer price index to increase the benefit to £67.50 a week in April. It was already half the official poverty threshold and 42% of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standard. Hunger and unpayable debt are inevitable.

As usual the Department for Work and Pensions has not considered the impact on health of poverty incomes and debt. The concept of society pouring out of No 10 does not include economic justice.